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Monday, 5 November 2012

Gary Carson interview: Hot Wire

A female car thief steals the
wrong car and finds herself the target of dark forces colliding over a sinister
government conspiracy.

What's
unique about it?

Hot Wire is a cross-genre suspense
novel, a fusion of noir crime and political conspiracy thriller inspired by the
mass paranoia and institutional corruption of 21st Century Amerika. A
fast-moving and at times darkly comic story of hot cars, organized crime and
black operations spiralling into chaos, the novel is narrated by one of the
more unusual protagonists in crime fiction, the 19-year-old professional car
thief, Emma Martin, aka "Little Bo Peep." An impulsive, scrawny
little runt with glasses and a ponytail, Emma's worries about her job security
lead her to jack the wrong car from the wrong people at just the wrong time,
triggering a series of events that cascade to an explosive conclusion.

What are
your expectations for the book?

Writing is a difficult racket to
break into and I try to be as realistic about my chances as possible. Taking
into account my own failings not only as a human being but as a writer, I
figure that Hot Wire will probably be a huge commercial success and make me
rich and famous. I expect the novel will be picked up by a major New York publisher and
become a runaway bestseller translated into a dozen different languages. Like
The Da Vinci Code, one of the masterpieces of modern literature, Hot Wire will
be the focus of reading circles and book clubs around the world. Housewives
will meet in their suburban living rooms to analyze the book and drool over my
photograph on the back cover, and the novel will be optioned by HollyWeird
after a frenzied bidding war that will drive the price into orbit. I will then
purchase the last surviving Foo Fighter and retire to New Swabia in Antarctica where the lingerie model Kate Upton will tend
to my basic physiological requirements.

What did
you learn while writing it?

During the course of writing Hot
Wire, I learned that 48 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute,
resulting in nearly eight years of content uploaded every day.

Do you
bear the reader in mind while you're writing? If so, how does that affect the
way you write?

Considering the fact that my only
reader lives in the United
States, I decided to write all of my books
in English instead of my native language,Gnomish. Also, since my reader is a member of the Church
Of God With Signs And Wonders, a
snake-handling cult in the Blue Ridge Mountains,
I try to keep my language as clean as possible. If I'm compelled for artistic
reasons to use particularly blasphemous or filthy words or phrases, I translate
them into Spanish or Russian using Google. For example, instead of saying
"Fuck a Jesus," a phrase I picked up from my bail bondsman, Charlie
Brooker, I'll say mbwa instead. This
baffles my reader and gives him the illusion that he's reading High Literature.

How
important is talent?

Talent is over-rated and
considering the quality of most of the dribble on sale in my local Barnes &
Noble, completely unnecessary to the creative process. Writing is a craft like
making a pipe bomb or using a Fleshlight and a writer has to master several
basic skills that have diddly-squat to do with talent.

You have to be able to multitask,
to work under pressure and ignore distractions. For example, a professional
hack can write a three-way sex scene between two lesbian meter maids and an
intelligent power drill while smoking a White Owl cigar and drinking a jug of
Ripple wine with the Craig Ferguson show on TV and Ozric Tentacles blasting
over the stereo, all with a headful of methylenedioxypyrovalerone.

To be productive, you have to know
how to locate the browser icon on your computer and the snooze button on your
radio-alarm clock, and you should have a basic knowledge of auto-erotica. And shoplifting
skills are essential to be a successful writer. You should have enough
knowledge of electronics to build your own EAS (Electronic Article
Surveillance) tag proximity deactivator and it's important to know that most
people never pay any attention to anything that's going on around them. The
best way to avoid capture is to deactivate those tags, then wheel your loaded
shopping cart out the door like you own it.

Nobody will notice. Guaranteed.

What's
the worst piece of craft advice you've heard?

Don't get me started on this. Most
writing advice is worthless, especially the swill you get in college
"writer's workshops" where a bunch of iGeneration douche-bags sit around in a circle
and criticize each other's work while the professor sits behind his desk, playing
with himself. After all, if the douche-bags knew anything about writing, they
wouldn't be taking a class to learn about writing, would they? And the gibberish
found in most writing-craft books in your local book barn isn't much better.

There's so much bad advice
floating around that it's hard to pick the worst, but "write what you
know" has to be in the Top Ten. If everyone followed that piece of wisdom,
we could eliminate most science fiction, murder mysteries, crime novels,
thrillers, horror stories and historical fiction, just to name a few
categories. All we'd have left would be books about writers drinking too much,
arguing with their teenage children, going to work for insurance companies and
sacrificing cheerleaders to Cthulhu in the middle of the night.

"Write a draft, then give it
to a friend who can review it and advise you."

Mbwa. I don't know about you,
but most of my friends are illiterate hillbillies who don't know jack about
writing and don't even read. In fact, the only person I know who reads anything
runs a small-town beauty salon and likes "Inspirational Romances."
Once I mentioned to an old hippy friend that I was writing a novel and he said
"Oh, you want to be the next Tom Robbins." The guy hadn't cracked a
book since he read the Cliff Notes version of Even Cowgirls Get The Blues back
in 1976.

There seem to be two schools of
writing: "important" literary academic bilge that focuses on language
and "irony," and commercial fiction written by actual writers who are
trying to make a living. The literary crap is surrounded by a smog of
platitudes about "muses" and "cultural significance" and
"finding your inner voice" that reeks of motivational seminars and
self-help manuals. For instance, I read one article that advised writers to
"honor the miraculousness of the ordinary," whatever the hell that
means. But the worst advice I've stumbled onto recently goes like this:

"Remember: writing doesn't
love you. It doesn't care. Nevertheless, it can behave with remarkable
generosity. Speak well of it, encourage others and pass it on."

In the real world, the writing
business works like this:

Put these
in order of importance: language, character, plot, money.Money. To what
extent do you view writing as a business?Writing is strictly a
business as far as I'm concerned. My heroes are the old pulp writers who
cranked out thousands of books under various pseudonyms at two cents a word in
order to pay the rent. Guys like Erle Stanley Gardner, for instance. The
ultimate hack, he dictated all of his Perry Mason novels on an ancient
dictaphone while lying around on a couch at his ranch in Temecula, California.
He produced dozens of paperbacks every year, employed a small army of
secretaries to transcribe his stuff and was one of the most successful
novelists in the world at one time. Now, that's what I call a business.
Unfortunately, I have a hard time seeing myself
as a business since businesses are supposed to make money. If this was 1930, I
don't think I'd have this problem.

About Me

I'm a Scottish writer. My debut novel, TWO-WAY SPLIT, was shortlisted for the CWA Debut Dagger award and went on to win the Theakston's Crime Novel Of The Year. I'm the author of four other novels: KISS HER GOODBYE (nominated for an Edgar), HARD MAN, SAVAGE NIGHT and SLAMMER and three novellas: KILL CLOCK , KILLING MUM and BYE BYE BABY, a Top Ten Kindle Bestseller. I'm also a co-founder (with Kyle "Smudge" MacRae) of digital publishing company, Blasted Heath, and a literary agent with Jenny Brown Associates.